Easy Rider Remembered.

Get your motor runnin'
Head out on the highway
Looking for adventure
In whatever comes our way

Their characters (Hopper as Billy and Fonda as Wyatt) start out on two super-chromed motorcycles purchased from a cocaine sale. They take along all the cash smuggled in their gas tanks. The one thing they DON'T take with them is their wrist watches. They strip them off and throw them to the ground.

In many ways the 1960s started out as a decade of split factions, growing more restless. Civil rights in 1963, escalating war in Viet Nam, war protests, civil disobedience. Culminating in the Summer of Love in 1967 and the horrors of assassination in 1968. By the time this movie was made, 1969, a man going around wearing long hair meant in some parts of the USA you were looking for trouble. You stood on the side that was splitting society apart.

"We blew it, Billie."

George(Jack Nicholson)gets murdered. Bad acid trip in New Orleans. Sullen ride down the road back to L.A. Two rednecks blow them away with a shot gun.

Blame it on French New Wave cinema, or a sense of 'hip' nihilism built into the story. The precedent might have been set two years earlier with Bonnie and Clyde. At any rate, for the next three years or so any action/lone individualist/outlaw movie had to end with the hero blowing up or dying (see Vanishing Point).

'Why don't you get a haircut?'

In an interview Dennis Hopper relates how they used real people in small town Louisiana in the film who truly hated them, letting them vent their hatred on film.

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